Bridging 2 Marriages and 4 Decades, a Large, Close-Knit Brood

John McCain and his daughter Meghan on the night he won the New Hampshire Republican primary in 2000.Credit
Stephan Savoia/Associated Press

Before Senator John McCain steps in front of an audience at a presidential debate, his daughter Meghan makes sure his nose is properly powdered. And from the campaign bus, Ms. McCain blogs about New Hampshire through the prism of politics and fashion (“I helped Dad pick out some swank Timberland boots.”)

But Ms. McCain, 23, is one of the stark exceptions among the seven McCain children, who have generally shied away from campaigning.

Among the Republican candidates, Mr. McCain, 71, of Arizona, has the greatest number of children, who span four decades, two marriages, numerous states and a broad swath of the political spectrum. But they are largely absent in a primary battle in which families — and all that their presence implies — are central ornaments.

Yet unlike the absent children of Rudolph W. Giuliani, who have strained relations with their father, the McCain children speak with endearment of Mr. McCain. They have maintained close relations with him in spite of long absences during childhood, a period of intense disappointment — among his older children when Mr. McCain remarried — and the breadth of geography and generations.

“I think he’d prefer the family kind of stayed private,” said Doug McCain, who at 48 is Mr. McCain’s oldest child and one of his four sons, and is a pilot for American Airlines. “I just think he is a big believer in individuals doing their own thing.”

Although his youngest sons are in the military — Jack, 21, attends the United States Naval Academy and Jimmy, 19, is a marine stationed in Iraq — Mr. McCain is loath to invoke their names when he defends his foreign policy positions, even once when Jimmy was sitting in the audience before deployment. (Hardly anyone knew he was there.)

On a recent stop in South Carolina, as a mother who had lost her son in Iraq began to suggest that Mr. McCain understood her plight because of Jimmy, Mr. McCain gently motioned for her to stop.

Ms. McCain is omnipresent at town-hall-style meetings, V.F.W. halls and other campaign stops, but quietly watches from the corner of the room, where she teeters on a pair of high heels in a dress that is perhaps not best suited for December. Even with her blog, Ms. McCain goes largely unrecognized. The senator likes to flip open his cellphone to display a photograph of the two of them at her college graduation — he calls it his “$200,000 screen saver” — even when Ms. McCain is standing just a few feet away.

Asked during an interview this fall about his reluctance to bring attention to his expansive brood, the normally loquacious Mr. McCain, who is unabashed on any number of topics, seemed uncomfortable.

“It’s intentional,” he said. “I just feel it’s inappropriate for us to mention our children. I don’t want people to feel that, it’s just, I’d like them to have their own lives. I wouldn’t want to seem like I’m trying to gain some kind of advantage. I just feel that it’s a private thing.”

Mr. McCain’s family is as complicated as it is large.

There are the children from his first marriage — Doug and Andy, from his first wife’s former marriage — whom he adopted when they were small, as well as a daughter, Sidney. Then there is the second family: Meghan, Jimmy, Jack and the McCain’s adopted daughter, Bridget, 16, who became a target of dirty campaigning in the 2000 presidential race, when she was portrayed as the child of an illicit union.

Over the past two decades, the families have merged during rafting trips on the Colorado River and late-night card games, the older children finding pleasures and similarities in their half-siblings.

In interviews with four of Mr. McCain’s seven children (two sons were not available because they were serving in the military, and the McCains do not allow Bridget to be interviewed), themes about life under the parental tutelage of John McCain emerged.

Sports were important, and grades mattered. If you wanted face time with Dad, you approached him as he stood over a sizzling grill. (“You can have an audience with him because he doesn’t want to leave the meat,” Andy said.) Unless you failed to manage basic responsibilities, your life choices were respected as long as they were within reason.

“I kind of figured out pretty quick in high school if you make good grades and play sports and were willing to follow a few basic rules you can pretty much do what you want,” said Doug, who with his younger brother Andy was adopted by Mr. McCain when he married their mother, Carol.

For Doug, Andy and Sidney, Mr. McCain’s oldest daughter, the earliest memories of Mr. McCain were his absence. The family lived on modest means in a Navy community in Florida while Mr. McCain languished in prison camps in Vietnam.

“I didn’t really have a father to miss because I didn’t know what a father was,” said Sidney, who was 9 months old when her father was captured and is now an executive in the music industry. “I was very spoiled at the time in the sense of complete strangers would come up and give me things like a P.O.W. bracelet or a stuffed animal.”

She said that when Mr. McCain came home in the spring of 1973, “I remember my dad just squeezing me and not wanting to let me go.”

Photo

Senator John McCain and his wife, Cindy, in a 1999 family photograph with, from left, Meghan, Bridget, Jimmy and Jack.Credit
Associated Press

“It was very overwhelming at the time,” she said.

On his return, his children found a discipline-minded dad who expected the yard raked, was intolerant of back talk, maintained a constant presence at the Little League games, where the handsome former prisoner of war drew crowds of admirers, or at their beach house, crabbing at low tide. “Dad was the spotter,” Andy recalled. “Just don’t miss one. You miss a crab and he’d get angry. He was very competitive that way.”

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Discipline and order returned to the house. “He had to find his way into the family dynamic that didn’t wait for him,” said Andy, who is 45. “My mom was running the show there for a long time and he wanted to set the tone quickly, and that was an evolution. But we didn’t have a problem knowing who was in charge. If you wanted to deviate from expected policy and he said no, he never felt an obligation to give you a reason.”

When the family went to a wrestling match at the Naval Academy and a group of thuggish kids would not get out of their seats, Mr. McCain told them, “You need to get out of those seats or I’ll get someone to get you out of them,” Andy recalled. “He was just a tough guy. And I remember feeling proud of that.”

After years of waiting for their family to congeal, the children were devastated when Mr. McCain left their mother for another relationship. Mr. McCain soon began a new life with Cindy, to whom he has been married for 27 years.

“It was very, very difficult,” said Andy, who — like his siblings — did not attend the wedding, and only met the second Mrs. McCain years later, in his father’s Senate office. “There will always be some memory there,” said Andy, who added that he had grown to be very fond of Cindy and who now plays a key role in her family-owned beer-distribution company in Phoenix.

The second family, children of privilege who grew up in the quickly developing Southwest, experienced an altogether different paternal presence, the senator-father who arrived on Friday nights from Washington, often to pass the weekends in the family country hideaway, but who was absent from the both the mundane and profound routines of growing up.

By all accounts of outsiders and siblings, the children get along, and some of them, like Sidney and Meghan, talk regularly. Many attended Jimmy’s graduation from Marine boot camp.

“Lots of guys would not have maintained a close relationship with those two boys,” Grant Woods, a former chief of staff for Mr. McCain, said of Mr. McCain’s relationship with his adopted sons. “And yet he has.”

His relationship with Sidney, 41, is perhaps the most politically interesting. Sidney, a registered Democrat until recently, has worked in the music business for years, and was the child who challenged Mr. McCain’s authority the most. She continues to debate him on a wide variety of issues.

Photo

Mr. McCain and his son Jack on a 2000 visit to the Hanoi prison where he was held for more than five years during the Vietnam War.Credit
David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

“Sidney is a character,” Mr. Woods said. “I think she stretched him a lot. When I was hanging around John, his favorite movie was ‘Gigi.’ Sidney has been very involved in the entertainment industry and taken him to the award shows even though her interests have been quite divergent from his. He is very close to her as well.”

By many accounts, Mr. McCain’s daughters were the most resistant to his authority. “I was the boundary pusher,” Sidney said. “In high school I was very rebellious. I needed to look at all sides. At least he would hear me out.”

The second chapter of Mr. McCain’s parenting life found him an established politician who spent most of his time in Washington, leaving his wife and small children for most of the week.

Mr. McCain has made concerted efforts to compensate for the many years that separate him and his second set of children. He has been known to accompany them to the MTV awards; he once woke Meghan with the news that Jennifer Lopez and Sean Combs had broken up. Mr. McCain’s aversion to relaxing is a trait all his children know well: he is the first one up on vacation, dragging the willing, and often the less than willing, on a hike.

Mr. McCain was the sort of father who would not discuss his torture at the hands of Vietnamese captors, who kept his emotions close, and whose second-oldest son saw him emotional only once, when a pet dog died. He was not the father sitting in the front row at back-to-school night, lobbing questions about curriculum, or the presence at the end of the bed after a bad date. But each of his children described him still as the most fun guy in the room.

“I know he had me later on in life, but I’ve never felt it,” Meghan said.

Mr. McCain has frequently said he never pushed his children toward a military career. Yet three of his four sons have been in the service; the fourth, Andy, was turned down by the Naval Academy. Doug was a Navy pilot, Jack is in the academy and Jimmy, whom Mrs. McCain described as “the sensitive one,” stunned many of his siblings by enlisting in the Marines.

“What I tried to teach them growing up was the importance of family and the importance of being in a historical family,” Mrs. McCain said.

When Jack, who once came home from summer camp with a trunk of clothes packed by his mother completely untouched, applied to the Naval Academy it was “the only school he applied to,” she said.

He told her, “I want to be a part of our family legacy,” Mrs. McCain said.

Yet the McCain children have also taken pains to separate themselves from their father’s name. Meghan, through a mix-up, once found herself in France with no place to stay, and slept in a bookstore rather than plead her case at the American Embassy. The singer Moby said he was friendly with Sidney for a number of years before he knew who her father was.

“There’s no reflected glory for kids of a candidate,” Andy said. “We’ve just chosen to lead our lives as out of the spotlight as we can.”

Correction: January 1, 2008

An article on Thursday about John McCain’s relationship with his children misstated, in some editions, the site of a graduation ceremony for Mr. McCain’s son Jimmy, which was attended by several siblings. Jimmy McCain graduated from Marine boot camp; there is no Marine Academy.

Marc Santora contributed reporting.

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